Status message

This proposal has been approved and the Eclipse TeXlipse project has been created.

Eclipse TeXlipse

Basics

This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process) and is written to declare its intent and scope. We solicit additional participation and input from the community. Please login and add your feedback in the comments section.

LaTeX is a typesetting system that is widely used by the science community for document preparation and publications. Eclipse TeXlipse is a plugin to enable Eclipse support for LaTeX projects. TeXlipse was first introduced around 2005, but support has dwindled since then. Although TeXlipse is still available via the marketplace and from SourceForge, the last release was in 2011 and there is no longer any active development or bug fixing. With the creation of the Science TLP, now is a great opportunity to reconstitute TeXlipse as an Eclipse project, and to create a community that will continue to maintain and even enhance the plugin.

Scope:

The Eclipse TeXlipse project provides an Eclipse extension to support LaTeX projects, so that document preparation can be incorporated into the normal Eclipse development activities.

Outside the scope of the project:

LaTeX tools and environments

PDF viewers

Description:

LaTeX is a typesetting system that is widely used by the science community for document preparation and publications. The TeXlipse project provides an Eclipse extension to support LaTex projects, so that document preparation can be incorporated into the normal Eclipse development activities. General LaTeX users will also find the advanced editing and automatic document generation features of TeXclipse provide a compelling alternative to other LaTeX environments. TeXclipse supports the following features:

Syntax/semantic editing of LaTeX documents

Code folding

Error annotations

Content assist

Line wrapping

Table editor

BibTeX editing support

F3 navigation

File and document outline

Templates

Build support (document typesetting)

Spell checking

Menu support for common LaTeX symbols

BibTeX and BibLaTeX support

Integration of PDF viewers

Bibsonomy integration

Why Here?:

Apart from providing support for a tool that is widely used by the science community, this is also a great opportunity to reinvigorate the project. By taking advantage of Eclipse's capabilities, it is possible that TeXclipse could become competitive with other open source LaTeX environments. For science, this could help create a motivating factor for developers to choose Eclipse as their preferred development environment.

Other Science WG projects may be interested to integrate TeXclipse features and services in scientific workbenches and workflows.

Eclipse TeXlipse is an existing SourceForge project that was originally developed at the Helsinki University of Technology. It is already EPL licensed so that does not present an issue, however it may be difficult to establish the provenance of the code given its age. The plugin also depends on Jazzy for spell checking which is LGPLv2 licensed. This support could be a works-with dependency or could be dropped altogether for the initial contribution.

Project Scheduling:

An initial contribution will be made immediately.

Integration with CI by end Q4 2016

Initial release to coincide with Oxygen

Future Work:

Other Science WG projects (e.g. Triquetrum) are interested to take advantage of LaTeX typesetting for document generation services. To that end the TeXlipse codebase must be refactored and corresponding service APIs and implementations must be added.

The initial contribution comprises a single plugin containing source code and documentation. The plugin provides a LaTeX parser and model, editor, and properties pages. It also includes a builder to support creating LaTeX documents from source, as well as menu integration. There are also wizards for project and file creation, template support, integration with spell checkers, and support for external document viewers. The documentation component provides user documentation and templates.

Thanks Sebastin! We just got the IP-approval through and have started preparing the initial contribution to Eclipse. We have not set a date for the first release but it will take place as soon as we have sorted out the continous builds, all the infrastructure and updated the code so that the plug-in is conforming to the latest Eclipse releases. Release plans and other details will be posted to https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/science.texlipse

Very happy to see this come along officially! I've seen various outcries on the web for a "LaTeX IDE" version of Eclipse even in the default installation setup. This can only be a move in the right direction.

I still use TeXlipse daily for my LaTeX reports in Neon and I have to say, forward compatibility is strong on this one!

Adding TeXlipse as an official Eclipse project is an excellent idea. TeXlipse has been a fundamental tool in my past, both for writing my thesis and for writing research papers, and it was the best text-based LaTeX editor system I could find. However it always "felt" a little "tacked-on" to Eclipse, as if it didn't quite belong. As such, becoming an official Eclipse project could only help TeXlipse to fulfill it's potential as one of the best LaTeX IDEs available.

For those that love Eclipse and also have to work with LaTeX, adding TeXlipse as an official Eclipse project is a no-brainer. :-)